Kuksa is a traditional wooden drinking cup from Lapland. I’ve sometimes seen it translated to English as “guksi” but I think “kuksa” is better so we’ll stick with that.
According to tradition, one cannot buy a kuksa. You either need to get one as a present or carve it yourself. A well crafted kuksa can last a lifetime – even though it is a wooden cup, it deals with cold and hot liquids without issues and won’t crack. So last summer I decided that I want a kuksa 😁
Not only did I want a kuksa, I wanted to find some nice whittling project after few butter knifes and magic wands. And especially as I had just bought a hook knife, especially made for carving wood, I wanted to try something where I could really use that.
I tried first to find a gnarl, specifically a birch gnarl, but those are very hard to get. It is not allowed to saw those off living trees and it’s not like one can walk to a wood shop and buy one either. After few days of trying I gave up and hunted down a good size birch log instead.
First phases of crafting a kuksa are quite coarse grained, I used an axe to split the birch log smaller, drew the outline of the kuksa there and then used a saw and some more axe to remove as much excess wood as possible.
Then finally some knife action! I took turns with a normal knife and the hook knife, trying hard not to lose any fingers or other more important body parts in the process. Cut protection gloves also helped with that goal.
Dried birch is very hard wood so whittling quite soon became very laborious and my wrists and fingers started aching. It took also some time to find the good techniques for carving the wood without risk of ruining the kuksa (or my fingers). A sliver shaved off can not be easily put back so slow progress is just fine 🙂
As always, summer and the warm weather ended too soon. Whittling inside is a bit messy so I don’t do that too often. Luckily there’s no hurry in getting the kuksa ready. Next steps are roughly finalising the shape, then kuksa needs to be boiled in very salty water to prevent it from cracking later when it is taken in use. Fine grained finalisation of the kuksa happens then last.
To be continued…